Francesco Villamena and the art of engraving in CounterReformation Rome

About this book

My dissertation studies the work of Francesco Villamena (1560s? - 1624). An engraver and publisher, he was active from the mid-1580s. A catalogue raisonné of his work provides the foundation for a broader study of the practice of printmaking in Rome. This is understood as encompassing questions of the printmaker's identity and self-fashioning, the mechanisms of trade and marketplace, as well as patronage. Its context is suggested by my title: the intersection of printmaking with a body of acts and discourses commonly associated with the term "CounterReformation." Chapters address different aspects of this meeting of the print medium with the machinery of control and registration, and with belief. The censorship of printed imagery, and the hermeneutic of censorship are examined. The role of the print in the campaigns promoting the cults of the new saints of the CounterReformation is explored, as is the patronage of the religious Orders. Canonization records are studied to determine the roles accorded prints by witnesses in these trials, and so the use of the print as a sign of belief and the expression of relationships. A case study examines the reception of Villamena's so-called Cries of Rome , a set of images which came to be understood as confusing secular and sacred. What links did contemporaries draw between the individual impression--the individual encounter of print and viewer--and the print as multiple? How did they understand the singularity and multiplicity of printed images? My dissertation attempts to bridge the micro- and macro-histories of the print: exploring the links between the printmaker's workshop, market, the image, and its reception. I map out the economic and social relationships tied to the print, asking how the accidents of production, distribution, and consumption of printed imagery impacted reception. The print is understood as a material object, as a product of social and economic forces, and as a medium. The result is a more sophistication model for both the print medium and the reception of imagery in circa 1600 Rome.